Swords v. Cthulhu

Ordo Virtutum Wendy N. Wagner

Hildegard leaned on her walking staff and picked her way around a mound of rubble. Mud and heaps of fieldstone covered the whole knoll of Rupertsberg, obliterating the pleasant hill where she’d chosen to build her new priory. The cost of construction, she supposed. At least the monks’ house was completed, its thatched roof and whitewashed walls in proper order, the whole structure cozy and inviting as it sat on its sandstone outcropping above the Rhine. The river’s waters whispered to themselves as they hurtled over their rocky bed, as if the river were still talking about the man it had brought to the Benedictines.

“It’s only a few more steps, Mother Hildegard.” Sister Richardis took Hildegard’s elbow.

Hildegard eased free of the girl’s grip. “I am well enough, Sister. Do not trouble yourself.” She looked around. The green of the untrammeled ground here at the edge of the construction site compelled her with its peace and viriditas — its lively green energy. She wished she could absorb some of that green to help her shake off the effects of her latest illness. She needed to be strong for her nuns. She had brought them to Rupertsberg to help them focus on the beauty of God’s creation, and now their strange guest threatened her hard work.

She took the last few steps toward the monks’ quarters and rapped on the door. It flew open, and Marten’s pale, nervous face peered out. He was only nine, and while promised to the service, was not yet a novice. She smiled at the boy. “Bless you, my child. Is Brother Arnold or Father Justin available?”

He shook his head hard. “Father Justin was called back to Disibodenberg. And Brother Arnold is resting.”

“I am awake now,” a reedy voice grumbled. The monk nudged the boy aside and gave Hildegard a solemn bow. He was as much in awe of her as the boy these days. “Holy Hildegard. How may I be of service?”

Hildegard waved Richardis inside and then followed her within the humble cottage. The space felt warmer and more homey than their own — but of course, this house was completed. The nuns’ more expansive quarters still awaited a real floor.

“Brother, why did the builders do no work today? I saw them arrive in the morning and their cart is still here, but there is no sign of them.”

Brother Arnold took a step backward. “I did ask the man.”

Hildegard brought her walking stick down with a thump. “Asked who?”

“The man from the river,” Marten interjected. He took a quick step behind Brother Arnold, eyeing Hildegard’s stick.

“The man from the river.” Hildegard sank onto the bench beside the fireplace. Yesterday, the workmen had pulled a stranger out of the rapids, tending him as best they could, but they had finally called for Hildegard in the night, and when she walked into the little infirmary, she’d seen something in the stranger’s sharp gray eyes that made her wish she could turn her back on the man. She felt for the rosary on her belt and squeezed its familiar beads. God had warned her that before this place would be her sanctuary, it would first be her greatest test. And now she knew the test was begun.

“He claims he is St. Rupertus returned, and the local men have gathered around him.” Brother Arnold dropped onto the bench beside Hildegard. Save for his cheerfully round belly, a legacy of his more comfortable life at the abbey in Disibodenberg, he was a small man, no taller than Hildegard. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

Sister Richardis knelt before Hildegard and clasped her hands about the older woman’s. “I told you this place was trouble, dear Mother. Our visions…”

The nun’s hands trembled around Hildegard’s. Hildegard took a deep breath. Sister Richardis had become her dearest companion, her helpmate, her friend. She would not let this sweet young woman be harmed by anything. She would not let harm come to any of her nuns.

She forced herself to her feet. “St. Rupertus and his mother, the wise woman Berta, joined our Lord many long years ago. Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.”

“But he says he is Rupertus!” the boy blurted. “And he can do things!”

Hildegard’s lips thinned. “What kinds of things?”

Three workmen stood outside the makeshift infirmary, their weather-beaten faces sullen and coarse. They stepped forward as the nuns approached, closing off the path. “No one disturbs His Holiness,” the one said. He held a long hoe in his hand, the sort stone workers used to spread mortar, and for the first time Hildegard realized how intimidating a weapon a simple hand tool could be.

She raised her hand in benediction. “Bless you, my son. I am here to check on my patient.”

“No one disturbs His Holiness.”

“If it weren’t for my help last night, the man would be dead. Now step aside.” She took a step forward.

The man’s tongue flickered at the corner of his mouth as he thought over what she said and then spat on the ground. The phlegm glistened, yellow and thick against the mud-worn ground. “Just you.”

Hildegard glanced at Sister Richardis, whose freckles stood out against her fair skin. She held herself bravely, but everything about this situation clearly made the young nun uncomfortable. Brother Arnold and Marten waited farther back on the path. Hildegard returned her attention to the workmen. Only the speaker looked at her. The other two stared at Richardis like hungry dogs in front of a fresh kill.

“Fine. Just me.” She leaned close to Richardis and whispered in her ear: “Take Marten and go warn the other sisters. No one is to leave their quarters. Bar the doors. I will rejoin you as quickly as I can.”

Then Hildegard drew herself up to her full height and strode past the men, her chin high and her shoulders squared: the image of confidence. They could not hear her heart pound in her chest as she passed.

She pushed open the door of the building that, when complete, would house the priory’s kitchen, and crinkled her nose at the scents that flooded out: the strong musk of working men and the sharper tang of medicinal herbs, all of it underwritten by a pungent and foreign smell that was something like hot tar. Stepping inside, she saw the man from the river sitting up in bed, now clad in a close-fitting tunic of homespun.

“I see you are awake.”

The man in the sickbed waved to her. “Mother Hildegard. How very good of you to check on me.” He spoke in cultured tones, his accent suggestive of the far north. If he was the reborn soul of St. Rupertus, he had traveled far since his time as the mystic hermit of the Rhineland.

“You are my patient.” As her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room, Hildegard noticed the four workmen of varying age crouched on the floor around the sickbed. They looked as ill-mannered as the lot outside. “I need a moment alone with you.”

The men looked up at her, their eyes flat and unreadable. As far as Hildegard could tell, those orbs held no intelligence, showed no sign of thought at all. She gripped her walking stick tighter.

“Go,” he commanded. “She will not trouble me.”

They stood as one, and she waited until they had filed out the door before she crossed to the false Rupertus’s side. “You know I have hired these men to build my church. They should be working.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You speak as if such worldly pursuits are of any interest to me. These men are like the two of us: they seek to honor God.”

“They honor God with their labor, not sitting on the floor staring at you.”

“You too shall sit and stare. Sit, Mother Hildegard. Sit and see my wonders.”

He sat up straighter in the bed. All the weakness and illness she had seen the night before had vanished. She had never seen such vitality in a man. She leaned against the wall, the small hairs on her arms and neck prickling. Despite his mundane appearance, some inner sense warned her Rupertus was nothing like an ordinary man.

He stretched out his hand, palm up, spreading his fingers as if holding an invisible ball. His eyes focused intently into space. A sound began, a tingling, whining buzz that she felt more than heard. It made her skin itch and crawl.

A faint purple glow appeared over his palm.

“A cheap mummer’s trick.”

He laughed, but did not take his gaze away from the purple gleam. A sheen of sweat appeared on his upper lip.

The purple light intensified and became a ball of colored fire, bright enough that Hildegard had to squint against its brilliance. A wriggling black line appeared in the heart of the flame. Her lips began to move in a silent Hail Mary. This. This was what God had warned Hildegard of in her visions, what Sister Richardis had dreamed about. This man and whatever was worming out of that purple fireball were part of her ultimate test.

The buzzing climbed in pitch until it was the scream of a mason’s auger, chewing into her ears and her mind. Her eyes screwed themselves up against the searing purple light. A black tendril burst out of the purple flames. It stretched itself long and then it flapped and writhed, and the buzzing grew louder, and suddenly the purple light was too bright to stand. Hildegard threw her free hand over her burning eyes.

The room went dark.

It took a minute for her eyes to see again in the lesser light of the tallow lamps and the fading sunlight coming through the shutters. The man who called himself Rupertus chuckled.

“What do you think of my little friend?”

Hildegard focused her dazzled vision on him. Some thing sat on his palm. The creature was no bigger than a sparrow, or perhaps a magpie, and crouched atop a cluster of black tentacles. Two scabrous wings flapped slowly behind it, holding up its sloppy body, which was too fat and bulbous to balance neatly on its slender tentacles. The surface of its breast suddenly rippled and pulled open to reveal the damp surface of an eye. Its pupil lolled about for a moment and then settled upon Hildegard. Its iris was as coldly gray as Rupertus’s. It blinked again, and then the moist tentacles scuttled up Rupertus’s arm.

Rupertus stroked the eyeball-creature’s wing and let it settle on his shoulder. “What does your god think now, Mother Hildegard?”

“Get out,” she commanded. “Get out of my priory.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood upright. “Your god’s time has come to an end. You’re welcome to join me, little nun.”

Hildegard pointed her stick at the door. “Go.”

“You’ll regret this,” he said, in the same mild voice someone might use to inquire about the weather. He stepped out the door and closed it softly behind him.

The room smelled more of tar than ever.

Hildegard rapped on the door of the nuns’ quarters, harder and more frantically than she intended. She forced herself to draw a deep breath and call out: “It’s me. Mother Hildegard. Let me in, sisters.”

A rumble sounded. Then the door opened a crack, and Marten’s small face peered through. “Is it really you?”

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, I swear I am the Mother Hildegard, once anchorite of Disibodenberg and now leader of this group of sacred brides.”

He opened the door a little wider. “Demons can’t speak the holy tongue, can they Mother Hildegard?”

She pulled him to her in a sudden hug. “I hope not, my child.” She pushed him inside. Richardis hurried to shove a heavy chest back in front of the door.

“We’ve heard things outside, Mother,” she whispered. “Like the sounds of beasts in the night, but much worse.”

“Demons,” Marten whispered. The young nun beside him, Diemud of Cologne, bobbed her head in agreement.

“What of the man from the river?” Richardis asked. She moved to the large trestle table sitting before the fireplace, and the other nuns joined her on the rough-planed benches. Just a few days earlier, the biggest concern of any of these high-born women was the number of splinters rubbing off the surface of these coarse benches — and now they feared demons and their own hired laborers.

“Is he really St. Rupertus?” Sister Ancilla, the oldest of the nuns, hugged a piece of firewood defensively to her chest. Her eyes were fixed on Hildegard, begging her for a comforting reply.

Hildegard shook her head. “I’m not sure why he would claim to be the good saint, other than to appeal to the memories of the local people. But there is nothing saintly about this stranger from the river.”

Ancilla added her wood to the fire and stirred up the flame. For a moment, the ten nuns sat in silence, each too caught up in her own fears to ask any more questions. Their anxiety filled the room like a chill mist.

Hildegard stood. “Sisters Ancilla, Richardis — perhaps you can prepare a simple meal for us. Marten will help. I must pray for guidance.”

Richardis nodded. Before they had arrived at Rupertsberg, none of them knew much about cooking, but circumstances had forced them to learn. Perhaps such hardship had been good for them all. Hildegard could only hope so.

She went to the straw mat in the corner of the house’s main room and dropped to her knees. The murmurs of the women’s work did not distract her from her purpose, and soon her mind dropped into the peaceful place where she had so often found God’s words. She let her eyes sag shut and floated there, outside of time and trouble, feeling only the wonder of creation buoying her up.

Little by little her senses returned to her. Grudgingly, Hildegard brought her awareness back to the room, where the nuns now sat sipping soup. The smell of turnips and onions made her stomach growl. The hand of God rested on her for one last moment, and then she was just herself again.

Little Marten helped her up. While she had been lost in prayer, Brother Arnold had joined them. Another trunk was piled in front of the door, too. Hildegard took her place at the end of the table and took a few eager bites of Richardis’s stew. Pins prickled inside her knees from such long kneeling.

“It’s been quiet the last few minutes,” Ancilla said. She went to the fireplace and poured hot water into a copper bowl, sending up the scents of rosemary and thyme. She dipped a cloth in the infusion and held it out to Brother Arnold.

Hildegard put down her soup spoon. “You are injured.” She hadn’t seen the gashes running down the right side of his face until he turned to take the cloth. The edge of his pink cheek was marred with dark blots of clotted blood.

“They burst into the cottage. I got away, but they followed me.”

“Who?”

Brother Arnold squeezed his eyes shut tight and clamped the cloth over his wounds. “The workmen.”

“They’re not men anymore,” Richardis spat. “I barely got the door shut on them. Their fingers are like claws, their faces like beasts’.”

Hildegard forced down another bite. She needed the strength. “The man from the river is like them,” she said. “Long ago he was a man: a man named Robold. The father of St. Rupertus.”

“But Robold died when Rupertus was only a child,” Richardis exclaimed. The lives of the local saints provided the material for popular songs and nursery tales around the region. All the nuns knew the stories. “After his death, Berta raised Rupertus to be a good and Christian man.”

“Yes,” Hildegard agreed. She pushed aside her bowl. “Robold fell into the river Nahe and drowned. I saw him go below the water in my vision.”

“But he’s not dead any longer.” Sister Richardis rubbed her face. “I wish I could remember my nightmares when we first came here. I know they had something to do with the dead and their return to the Earth, but my mind was not made to hold such horrors.”

“This resurrection is a mockery of the one promised to us all by the Lord. Robold’s life was given back to him by something that does not belong in our Creation. He has returned here because this place is somehow sacred to him or some infernal being.”

“A demon?” Brother Arnold shook his head. “ Could he be a demon?”

“I believe he is possessed or in servitude to such a foul creature.” Hildegard looked around the table. “Sister Richardis knows that God warned me this place would be a great sanctuary to all women who wish to serve Him — but only after we had faced a great test. This is the test. I don’t know what Robold plans to do here, but I do know that we cannot allow him to take Rupertsberg from us. The fate of all people everywhere hinges on us today.”

These were peaceful men and women of God. They looked back at her with blatant terror, for none of them were fighters. Not a one of them had trained for anything more dangerous than embroidery or cheese-making or playing the psaltery. But God’s ways worked themselves out on a scale far larger than human reason, Hildegard reminded herself, and she had an idea, given to her by her enemies. Because these weren’t just peaceful men and women of God. These were members of the Benedictine order, and though they did not know it, they possessed all they needed to face this evil.

Outside, something howled with a voice colder and crueler than a wolf. The forests of the Rhine and Nahe river valleys were places with dark legends and terrifying tales, and Hildegard knew every person in the room was now recalling them. Her time with God had made her certain there was truth in such tales. She had to show them that they belonged in a different kind of story.

She slapped her palms down on the table. “We are Benedictines. We are an order of virtue and holiness, a force of good in the world. And we shall not let these demons shake our faith.”

Marten stood up from his seat beside the fire. “God is with you, Mother Hildegard.”

She looked around the table and saw the fear fade from their eyes. “God is with all of us.”

“Can you go now?” Sister Guda hissed in pain. “Your heel is digging into my shoulder.”

“Have strength, Sister,” Hildegard encouraged her. Guda’s already florid face flushed darker. Sister Richardis slipped over the windowsill and disappeared into the darkness.

“I’m next,” Marten piped. He scrambled up onto the bench and then onto Guda’s broad shoulders. He hesitated only a moment before going over the edge.

“I mislike sending him out there,” Brother Arnold whispered.

“You next, Sister Diemud.” Hildegard gave the youngest of the nuns a squeeze on the shoulder. She turned back to the brother. His cuts had begun to scab, but they looked swollen and red. They would soon need a poultice lest they become septic. “They’re the only ones small enough to get through the gardening shed window,” she reminded him. “We need weapons.”

The workman’s hoe had inspired the idea. Benedictine rule decreed that all communities must strive for self-sufficiency, and Hildegard’s first order of business building her priory had been the establishment of a large garden. Just as importantly, she had made sure her people had all the necessary tools to maintain an orchard and small farm.

“I am a man of peace,” he began, but Hildegard hushed him with a wave of her hand.

“At times, peace must be defended. Today we will be warriors of God. Tomorrow, we can repent.”

“If there is a tomorrow,” a sister whispered, and someone else shushed her.

Hildegard felt for her rosary. Her parents had given it to her before she had been shut away as an anchorite with Sister Jutta in Disibodenberg, a lifetime ago. It had been the only dependable comfort in her childhood. Loneliness had subsumed her in that quiet, closed up place, and it would have eaten her alive if she hadn’t had God by her side. His words had given Jutta a reason to educate the little girl. His words had changed her life.

She rolled a bead between her fingers. Time and hard use had worn it smooth. Sometimes she still felt like that young girl, cloistered from the world. How little she knew about things like weapons and fighting. She could only pray she was doing the right thing.

Silence lay over the priory’s muddy grounds. She tried to envision where Robold and his creatures might be, but nothing came to her. Construction had torn open the entire hillside, gouging open pits in the ground for harvesting sandstone and the usable remains of ancient ruins. Outside of this house, the other completed buildings were far too small to contain a group of any size. She closed her eyes and listened hard, her lips moving in silent prayer.

“Mother Hildegard! We’ve the tools!”

Marten’s voice came from far away. Hildegard opened her eyes and saw the others already moving around her. She squeezed her eyes shut again. She had seen something for a moment, a tiny hint of a vision. But now it was gone.

“Mother, hurry!”

She followed Ancilla out the door. The nuns’ temporary quarters sat on the flattest flank of the hill, and the ground here was much trammeled by carts and workers. Above, the night sky hung heavy, the clouds swollen and black over the distant gleaming of the stars. Nothing interrupted the priory’s stillness save for the slight clinking of her nuns distributing hoes and scythes and loppers.

Hildegard’s preparations had served her nuns well. There were tools enough for all. As Sister Richardis stepped forward with her small hand scythe in one hand and a sharp trowel in the other, the clouds pulled away from the nearly full moon and gleamed on the makeshift weapons. Demon or not, Robold’s creatures wouldn’t care for a face full of good steel.

“Mother Hildegard. I see you’ve come out to enjoy the night air.”

Hildegard turned to face the man from the river. He stood on the other side of the broad work site, balanced on an outcropping of sandstone, with a mass of tentacled things crawling about his shoulders. His followers had dressed him in their garb, but he wore their cast-off hose and tunic as if they were ermine and cloth-of-gold. He grinned down at her, smug and certain.

“Robold.” The man stiffened when he heard his true name, but the grin did not slip from his face. “You and your creatures are not welcome here on God’s land. Be you gone.”

He leaped down from the stone. “This was my land long before it belonged to your Christian church. My wife and my puling son may have tried to undo my work here, but the god I serve will see my labors completed.”

“How virtuous,” Hildegard said. She nodded to her left and her right. “But you see, my order has taken charge of this land.”

Sister Diemud snapped the blades of her lopper together.

A squelching and rustling came from behind Robold, and she saw the men who had once been her hired workers. Their skin clung tight to their bones, their eyes like burnt-out hollows, and their teeth showed as if their lips had receded into their faces. These wizened creatures were men no longer, but mere husks.

Robold had done this. She could feel his power drawing at her own life force. If they did nothing, he would drain the viriditas from all the land, just as he drained it from the men who so adored him.

“Sweet merciful Jesus,” Brother Arnold whispered beside Hildegard.

And then the sky rippled. Behind the dark clouds and the rich blackness that lay between the stars, a light pulsed. It was nearly purple, almost like the light Robold had called up in the infirmary, but it was like no purple Hildegard had ever seen. It strove against the firmaments of heaven, stretching them thin as it strained toward the wicked man from the river.

Hildegard closed her eyes. She had seen this before, moments ago in that hint of a vision, but once before even that. God had shown her the nature of Creation, its beautiful shape and form like an egg cradling wonder instead of yolk. She had not understood the things that strained toward it from outside the universe God had built, but now she did. There were other gods in other creations, and they would swallow her own unless she stopped them.

She opened her eyes again. Robold’s creatures had crept closer, but her nuns held firm. No one moved.

“What do we do, Mother?” Richardis whispered.

“We fight,” she ordered.

Sister Richardis darted forward, trowel and scythe gleaming in the moonlight. Her blade caught the nearest man-husk in the throat and ripped through it with a sound of tearing vellum. The creature stood motionless for a second and then crumpled to the ground.

“Ygnailh ygnaiih thflthkh’ngha Yog-Sothoth!”

Robold’s shriek cut the air and the sky exploded.

Hildegard’s feet went out from under her and she hit the ground hard. She twisted around and saw the shriveled hands that gripped her ankles. The rest of the skeleton pulled itself out of the ground, using Hildegard as a ladder.

The dead were joining Rupertus’s workmen even as things unimaginable burst out of the sky. All around her, women screamed. Sister Ancilla leaped over a fallen man-husk and slammed a hatchet into the skull of a newly mobile skeleton. Hildegard scrabbled for her fallen walking stick and smashed the legs of the skeleton clambering over her. The thing tumbled off her.

She jumped to her feet. Her heart lurched in her chest and she knew her fragile body was being pushed beyond its means, but she managed to bring up her stick and send the skeleton’s mummified head flying. A cool wind gusted against her back, and she whirled around.

Dozens of wings flapped in a vortex of roiling tentacles, and at its heart was Robold. Tendrils of black oil curled about him, sliding up and down his human body and seeping under his skin. Whatever powers had brought him out of death, they had transformed him and subsumed him. Black inky splotches rained down out of the sky, but Hildegard kept her eyes on the stranger from the river. He had brought this to her land. He was the one she needed to destroy.

She raised her stick above her head. “Glória tibi, Dómine.” She closed her eyes and opened herself to the power of God. “Laus tibi, Christe.”

“Credo in unum Deum!” a small voice shouted, and she knew it was Marten, brave little Marten, and all around her she heard the others take up the cry.

She lowered her staff and stared into the writhing heart of the thing that had once come out of the river. “I believe in one God,” she said, in the simple German that was her native tongue. “And it’s not yours.”

A lance of emerald fire burst from the tip of her walking stick. Viriditas: the pure green glory of life, and the cleanest manifestation of God’s glory. She focused it on the unclean being in front of her and watched it burn off a thick black tentacle.

“Enough!” Robold shouted, and slapped her aside with a black-dripping limb. Hildegard slammed into the wall of the nuns’ house and lay still, her head spinning. Robold’s oily ichor hissed as it seared into her skin.

“Hildegard!” Richardis screamed. She raced toward Hildegard. Her veil slipped back on her head, revealing her golden hair. Her habit rode up to show her strong white legs. She looked like a queen out of one of Hildegard’s visions, all her power drawn from seemly virtue and the love of God’s creation.

A creature of wavering mist and black twisted bones slammed into the young nun, driving her down into the mud. Its horrible snarl rose up above the chaos of shrieking and chanting and the man-husks’ mindless gurgling growls. Richardis shrieked in pain.

Hildegard pulled herself upright. She had to get to Richardis. Had to protect her. Her heart raced and stammered in her chest.

“No!” a voice cried out, and a slight figure threw itself at the creature of bone and mist. Something crunched horribly.

“Marten,” she whispered. She saw her stick now, lying just a few feet away. She lurched toward it. A tentacle lashed out at her but overshot her wimple, and dropping to her knees, she grabbed the staff. “Get away from her, fiend!”

Green light again flashed from her staff, piercing the bundle of smoke and bones and illuminating it with the fury of summer lightning. The creature howled in pain. For a moment, time seemed to stop, and then the beast exploded in a blast of ash and soot.

Hildegard crawled toward the spot where Richardis had fallen. Her hand came down on something soft and warm and she pulled back in disgust, only to realize it was not some foul creature, but only Marten’s slender leg. She shook it. “Marten?”

The boy did not move. She crawled closer to his face, his cheek pressed into the mud. He didn’t move. “Marten?” she whispered again.

“Mother Hildegard?”

The cracked voice was not the boy’s. “Richardis! You’re alive!”

“Watch out,” the younger nun warned, and Hildegard sprang aside just as a claw-tipped hand raked at the air where she’d been.

Robold laughed. “It’s almost over, my little nun. The veil between worlds has parted, and my god will be here soon.”

His voice sounded human enough, but the rest of him had been subsumed in the evil he had brought forth through the tear in the sky. The stench of hot tar boiled off him, and black oily goo dripped from his every limb, uncountable as they seemed to be. Wings and tentacles and purple pincers wriggled and snapped all about him. His own gray eyes were lost in the cluster of leering orbs.

Hildegard squared her shoulders. Marten had trusted her to do the right thing. Now she had to trust God.

“By the spirit of God, I shall cast thee out.” She raised the staff one last time and opened herself up to the power of her faith.

Viriditas.

She floated in a sphere of perfect green. The breath of the trees and the grass and all the lovely green things of the world passed through her body, warm, gentle, and full of the sweetness of creation. The spirits of many beings wafted past her: fir trees and edelweiss, clover and mint, timothy hay and honeysuckle and plants she could not even name: all this and more. She was borne up on the emerald vision of God’s flora, one with all of them, green in and out.

“Go!” she roared, and the breath of the plants rushed out with the word.

Green.

Green.

Green.

Skeletons burst into flower. Husk-men crumbled into puffballs and morels. Robold’s sick and alien form went stiff. His eyes widened. For an instant, they shone back at her, the gray melting into pools of emerald. He opened his mouth to cry out and a clump of ferns burst out of his lips.

Thunder shook the entire hill. Hildegard turned her face up to the sky. Lightning, ordinary white lightning, flashed across the purple tear that ran between the stars. The sky shimmered for an instant. And then it went right, black and cloudy.

The world smelled like rain.

Water poured from the sky, sluicing away the remnants of Robold’s creatures. Hildegard’s nuns stood silently. They could only stare around themselves, wondering at all they had seen this dark night.

“It was the boy,” Brother Arnold said. “He sacrificed himself for us all.”

“It was God.” Hildegard blinked back tears. “It was all of us and it was God.”

She turned her gaze to the strange tree that now grew beside her, its branches as twisted and contorted as an octopus’s tentacles. A clump of ferns grew out of its center. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen such green and lustrous ferns.

Thunder rumbled again, the comforting sound of a world returned to order.